Colorado’s online schools will have to track their students and will face limits in how they rebrand themselves if Gov. Jared Polis signs a bill that’s on the way to his desk.

Senate Bill 129, approved by both houses of the General Assembly, would require the state’s online schools to track and report to the Colorado Department of Education if students drop out or leave for other schools between the annual enrollment count day and the end of the school year, as well as the grade level of students who leave.

It also would force low-performing online schools to seek approval from the state education department before reopening under another name, and would keep them on performance watch even if the organization authorizing them changed.

Rep. Meg Froelich, a Democrat representing Arapahoe County, said she agreed to cosponsor the bill with Sen. Tammy Story because of a lack of information about how well schools are serving students. She said online schools are a good option for some students, but the state needs a way to stop bad operators.

Schools “dissolved and almost like whack-a-mole would reappear with almost the same people,” she said.

There was little opposition to the bill. Tillie Elvrum, board director for the Colorado Coalition of Cyberschool Families, said she had some concerns that the reporting required in the first draft of the bill would be excessive, but its final form was acceptable. Ideally, the state would expand the provision tracking students’ grade levels to see if students are behind when they arrive in a school, she said.

“Are you penalizing online schools for taking on some of the most vulnerable students?” she said.

Colorado requires an organization such as a school district to authorize nontraditional schools, including online programs and charters. Those schools then go through the same grading process as other schools, which puts them into one of four performance categories based on factors like test scores and graduation rates. Persistently low-scoring schools have to come up with improvement plans.

Of 29 virtual schools with rankings on the Colorado Department of Education website, only five were in the two lowest categories of the state’s school performance framework. Students at online high schools were less likely to graduate on time than students in traditional classes, however.

Kenneth Witt, executive director of Education Reenvisioned BOCES, which runs two virtual schools, said graduation statistics don’t fully capture the experiences of online students, who move more often than other kids and may bounce between virtual and traditional schools.

Some students turn to virtual options because they want to accelerate their learning, but others have fallen behind or gotten in trouble in their previous schools, Witt said.

“We have a significant population that has struggled in a brick-and-mortar school,” he said.

Michael Barbour, an associate professor at Touro University California who studies online schools, said online schools generally have underperformed compared to traditional schools at the national level. One of the biggest problems is that those schools tend to not have enough staff, and parents are responsible for guiding their children’s learning, he said.

Some online schools produce better results, and they tend to be specifically designed for certain students’ needs, Barbour said. For example, a Michigan online school working with students who have been expelled requires them to check in at a physical location each week and to only take two courses at a time so they can focus — measures that help keep students who struggle with focus on track, he said.

“Essentially, these were all decisions that they took based upon the idea of what are the needs of this particular group of students,” he said.

Meg Wingerter came to Denver from The Oklahoman in Oklahoma City, where she covered health. She previously worked at Kansas News Service, The Topeka (Kansas) Capital-Journal and The Muskegon (Michigan) Chronicle. She grew up in Pennsylvania and attended Michigan State University.

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